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Study: Boosting Soft Skills Is Better Than Raising Test Scores

By National Soft Skills Association 143 Comments

A recent study was just released by Northwestern University’s Kirabo Jackson on the effect of soft skills vs test scores. This study demonstrates that schools that build social-emotional qualities are getting better short-term and long-term results for students than schools that only focus on improving test scores.

https://hechingerreport.org/early-research-focuses-on-schools-that-develop-students-social-emotional-qualities/

This study included 150,000 high school students in all 133 Chicago Public Schools from 2008 onward, and reported that schools putting soft skills ahead of test scores produced students with higher grades, fewer absences and fewer disciplinary problems and arrests in high school. The students who attended these high schools also graduated and went to college at higher rates .

Another focus of the study was on two problematic behaviors—attendance and disciplinary incidents with ninth graders from 2011-2017. The results showed that schools emphasizing soft skills over test scores had fewer absences as well as disciplinary incidents. For students who entered ninth grade between 2011-2014, researchers found that students who attended schools focusing on soft skills had fewer arrests during their high school years and graduated in higher numbers.

Jackson says, “You could actually do a lot more good by focusing on schools that promote social-emotional development as opposed to focusing on schools that focus on test scores.”

In February of 2020, Jackson presented the findings at a conference for the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Educational Research (CALDER). There are four co-authors from The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, Northwestern University and Mindset Scholars Network.

Filed Under: Research & Publications

The Value of Soft Skills in the Labor Market

By National Soft Skills Association 27 Comments

Economists are increasingly focused on the importance of so-called “soft skills” for labor market success. The evidence is overwhelming that these skills — also called “non-cognitive skills” — are important drivers of success in school and in adult life. Yet the very term soft skills reveals our lack of understanding of what these skills are, how to measure them, and whether and how they can be developed. And the term “non-cognitive” is simply used to mean “not predicted by IQ or achievement tests.”

Read the full article: https://www.nber.org/reporter/2017number4/deming.html

Filed Under: Research & Publications

Why Soft Skills Are so Difficult to Teach

By National Soft Skills Association 20 Comments

A lot has happened in the field of soft skills over the last few years. Awareness of the need for employees to possess soft skills such as attitude, communication, critical thinking, and professionalism, to name a few, has begun to reach a fevered pitch. High school career and technology education (CTE) programs as well as post-secondary institutions have identified the need to offer training in soft skills. Many programs have taken the approach of trying to integrate soft skills training with hard skills training. On the surface, integrating the two sounds like a good idea, however I wonder what the results of such training will provide. The reason for my doubt is that just teaching the concepts of soft skills is not good enough, you have to go deeper.

The Foundation Blocks of Soft Skills

There are hidden skills or competencies that are needed as the as foundation blocks upon which soft skills can be taught. These necessary building blocks are known as emotional intelligence or EQ. EQ is a learned ability to identify, explain, understand and express human emotions in healthy and productive ways. Without these foundation blocks, a learner’s ability to understand and to use soft skills is very limited.

Here is how this works:

In education, the targeted skill being taught is soft skills. The next step is to identify the soft skills competencies that need to be taught. Simple, right? What is missing are the foundation blocks that the soft skills competencies are built upon. Those foundation blocks are EQ competencies.

The foundation blocks of Interpersonal Skills

Interpersonal skills are actually social skills and cover how to interact with other people and present oneself in an acceptable manner. It includes such topics as interpersonal skills, controlling your emotions, socializing at work, networking, responding to conflict and helping customers.

The core EQ foundation skills needed in order to develop these interpersonal skills are self-esteem, interpersonal awareness, empathy and supportive environment.

• Self-esteem is how positively you view yourself. It is a perceived level of personal worth and is the most important EQ competency of them all for developing positive relationships. Contrary to what the current experts say about self-esteem (they think it does not exist), it is a key competency in interpersonal relationships, for it dictates how people might feel about themselves in social situations. If people feel good about themselves, they also demonstrate positive feelings about the others around them.

• Interpersonal awareness first starts with intrapersonal awareness or awareness of self. Once people become aware of themselves they can then become aware of others. Awareness of others also requires a good understanding how others might be responding to them. Many people on the autism spectrum struggle with this concept.

• Empathy is the cornerstone of EQ. Empathy covers how to sense, understand, and accept another person’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Empathy is a primary characteristic of skilled communicators and a key aspect in interpersonal or social skills.

• Supportive environment is the extent to which friends, family or peers have impact on an individual’s achievement and how they can positively encourage people in achieving their personal goals and improving relationships.

As you can see here, there is a lot more to the soft skill of interpersonal skills than meets the eye. Remember you cannot teach soft skill competencies while ignoring the underlying necessary EQ competencies.

Filed Under: Research & Publications

The NOT So Surprising Thing that Google Learned about Its Employees – And What It Means for Today’s Students

By National Soft Skills Association 35 Comments

 In an article in today’s Washington Post written by Valerie Strauss, The surprising thing Google learned about its employees –and what it means for today’s students, the Post explains what Google learned about its employees through their own research on hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s founding in 1998.  This results of this research project, called Project Oxygen, shocked everyone by concluding that among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM skills came in dead last.

The other seven qualities were all soft skills and include:

  • Being a good coach
  • Communication skills
  • Possessing insights into others and different values and points of view
  • Empathy toward one’s colleagues
  • Critical thinking
  • Problem solving
  • Drawing conclusions (making connections across complex ideas)

While this is a very excellent insight and very important to recognize, it is not new to us at the National Soft Skills Association.  Let me quote an article we posted on August 3, 2017.

“It has been 100 years since the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released a study on engineering education authored by Charles Riborg Mann. In his study, 1,500 engineers replied to a questionnaire about what they believed to be the most important factors in determining probable success or failure as an engineer. Overwhelmingly, personal qualities were considered seven times more important than knowledge of engineering science.

A second circular letter stating Mann’s results was sent to 30,000 members of four large engineering societies, and each member was asked to number the six qualities needed for top engineers. The top six qualities were:

  • Character
  • Judgment
  • Efficiency
  • Understanding of others
  • Knowledge
  • Technique

Notice that the top four are soft skills while only the last two were hard skills?

Education Has Not Changed

A quick study on curriculum used in high schools, community colleges, colleges and universities across this country reveals that nothing has changed in 100 years. Educational institutions simply ignore the research on soft skills along with the requests of their local employers. They continue to teach the technical knowledge and skill sets for an occupation but leave out the soft skills assessment and training that are critical to success in any occupation.

After working in this industry for over forty years, I have come up with the conclusion that soft skills are not taught because there is an assumption that students already have these skills, even when employer advisory panels tell them that their graduates do not.

Bad Assumptions Lead to Bad Results

In most situations, educational institutions assume that their students posses these skills, learning them either from their families or other life experiences. This may have had some validity in the past, but if parents or other adults do not possess soft skills, how can they teach them to others?
This incorrect assumption leads to costly errors in the hiring process. I don’t have to go into the cost of a mis-hire. It is sufficient to say that, when a student leaves a college, enters the working world, and does not even know enough to show up on time every day, the cost to the employers is in the tens of thousands of dollars, to say nothing of the cost to the self-confidence of the employee.

Check the Standards

I once asked a good friend of mine who worked for a state Department of Public Instruction if he could give me the standards for freshmen algebra. After several weeks of searching, he came back to me and was embarrassed to say that there were no standards other than seat time. Since then, there has been a push to create state and national education standards for academics. A quick check on those reveals that there are still no standards for soft skills.

80/20 Rule

It was established back in 1918 by Mann’s study on engineering education that approximately 80 percent of success is due to soft skills while 20 percent is due to hard skills.

I ask a simple question—Why has this fact been ignored by the educational establishment for 100 years?”

Filed Under: Research & Publications, Top 5

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